Star Wars - Kella Rand, Reporting... by Laurie Burns

Author:Laurie Burns [Burns, Laurie]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 1995-05-11T00:14:20+00:00

He captured her gun hand with professional ease, and pressed a painfully strong arm across her throat, dragging her back into his turbolift. Gasping, Kella saw the hover-cam whirring down the hall towards L’varren’s suite. The doors slid shut and she gasped again as he wrenched her wrist, sending a white-hot flare of pain up her arm, followed by numbness. She only knew she’d dropped the blaster when he kicked it to the other side of the lift and it skittered to a halt against the wall. With a fresh surge of awareness, she realized he held a vibro-knife near her face.

“How about you be smart and hand over the vidclip, huh?” he said softly in her ear, and she shivered to hear such a cool, conversational tone from a man holding a knife to her throat.

Forcing a calm to her voice that she didn’t feel, she carefully agreed. “If you insist on it.”

“I do,” he said. Switching the weapon to his other hand, he reached around and slipped his fingers into the datatote at her side. Acutely aware of the vibrating blade so close she could practically feel it snipping off strands of hair, she stiffened but kept silent as he conducted his search. Her identi-credcard, datapad, room key, and some local currency were raised for his inspection before being unceremoniously dropped to the floor.

The handful of datacards he kept, shoving her away and stuffing them into his jacket in the same quick motion. Kella stumbled into the lift’s wall, turned around, found him scooping up her blaster and pointing it at her. She froze.

“It really won’t do you any good, you know,” she told him, unable to suppress a sudden spurt of defiance. “Just getting rid of my copy of the vidclip won’t get rid of the one I already filed in the newsbank. Once the courier picks up the message packet, you won’t be able to cover this up, no matter what you do to me.”

He smiled, a mere showing of teeth. “The report you filed no longer exists,” he corrected politely. “When the newsdroid arrives, there will be no report on this incident at all from the infamous Kella Rand.”

She frowned at him.

“A tap of the keypad here, a deletion of a file there …” He shrugged. “It’s not so hard to make a report disappear. Especially with the help of someone with the proper access codes.”

Juloff, of course. So the bureau reporter truly had betrayed her. Somehow, making her news report disappear seemed even worse than taking potshots at her on the street.

“Why?” she asked. “Why would he do that?”

“Because he’s a loyal citizen of the Empire,” Darme said flatly. “Just as I am. And no upstart Rebel government is going to set up shop on Indu San, or get its slimy fingers into our people. Not while we have any say about it.”

She stared at him blankly, then the why suddenly fell into place and realization dawned. “Is that what this is all about?” she asked.

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